


The Right Man in the Wrong Place

by MaximumSnow



Category: Half-Life, Portal (Video Game)
Genre: I wouldn't be shocked if it already exists, If I continue this, Including bits of Portal Story Mel, Post Epistle 3, This was an idea that refused to leave me alone, and that's a big if, more characters and tags will be added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-22
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2019-11-27 15:32:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18196049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaximumSnow/pseuds/MaximumSnow
Summary: After the third epistle, Gordon has nothing left other than a passing fancy to find where the Borealis came from.





	1. Chapter 1

_Yours in infinite finality._

He wasn’t sure why he had even bothered writing the letter. The intended recipient was likely long gone, and it wasn’t like he had a way to send it. But he kept it on him anyway as he wandered the new world. Sometimes people recognized the insignia on his HEV suit as the symbol of the long-gone resistance, but with the tentative era of rebuilding, the once vivid image of the war heroes had faded. No one recognized him as The One Free Man.

 

Now that he had all the free time in the world, he could finally laugh in bitter irony at the moniker. He hadn’t been free when they called him that. Hell, he wondered if he had ever been free. How long had the G-Man watched him and manipulated events around him? The strange being had a way of hiding in the background where if you didn’t know what you were looking for, he would be easy to miss.

 

Gordon tried to not think on that too much. He didn’t want to believe that he had been raised to be the perfect pawn for some interdimensional war he had never wanted to be part of. He hadn’t even known it existed. He would have never believed it had you asked him… a few months ago. Well, really, more than a few years ago, but to him, the downfall of Black Mesa had only happened within the last year.

 

He had been plucked out of his world to be kept in stasis until he was needed again. He missed seeing his mentor’s daughter grow up. One of his closer friends suffered twenty years of not knowing what happened to him. And they all suffered the Seven Hours War without him. _Because_ of him.

  
These thoughts would wander his mind as much as he himself would wander. He passed through new cities and towns, and he couldn’t help but be in awe at how tenacious humans could be. He knew he had missed a fair amount of years, but it was still stunning to see how people had taken the ruins of the old and started building anew.

 

Most of them were kindly to him even if they had no idea who he was. However, no matter how much they tried to convince him to stay, he kept going. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but with nothing to hold him down, he kept moving.

 

He hadn’t realized it until he found an old freeway sign being used as a decoration that he had somehow found his way to the upper peninsula of Michigan. It wasn’t called that anymore, and he received strange looks when he wrote that message down, but once shown a map, he knew exactly where he was.

 

It wasn’t too far from some coordinates he had seen on the Borealis. The coordinates where the Borealis had started its disastrous journey through time and dimensions.   


He wasn’t sure what would be left there, but he had nothing else to do. Who knew? Maybe there would be other devices of a similar make hidden in the depths of the Aperture Laboratories. He highly doubted he could cause any other problems in this world, and if the defunct devices killed him, then at least he died trying.

 

Maybe that’s what he hoped for.

 

Alyx was probably the only one left alive from the resistance, and he had no idea where or when G-Man had taken her. The Vortigaunts couldn’t find her, and even though they would have been willing to help, Gordon didn’t feel it was right to make them waste their time and energy. Not for him. They were willing to spit in G-Man’s face for him, but he didn’t want them to risk their lives just because they revered him.

 

The more time he spent in this new age, the more of an outsider he felt. With everyone in his past life dead, or missing, in Alyx’s case, it felt as if he didn’t have a place anymore. Maybe dying in the ruins of Black Mesa’s biggest competitor would be some form of justice. He had, after all, flung one of their projects into an alien warship.

 

Thoughts of Aperture, and what it had been before the resonance cascade, carried him until he thought he found the coordinates. He wasn’t entirely sure what he expected, but something felt… Off. There was an old rundown shack in the middle of the field, but the field was strangely maintained despite having no farms nearby. The shack also didn’t seem like it had been abandoned for over fifty years. Maybe a decade or two, but it didn’t look like a building meant to last.

 

On a whim, he knocked on the door and tried to open it. It didn’t work. Despite his chosen profession, Gordon wasn’t a weak man, so the door with the rusty, broken looking lock refusing to budge was very strange. He even tried shoving his crowbar into the crack, but the hole wasn’t big enough. Sighing, he dropped the metal tool to the ground, and he sat beside it.

 

He leaned his back against the unyielding door in order to hide in the shade while he tried to think of what to do next. He could try finding another way to pry open the door, but he felt what little resolve he had left starting to fade. Another closed door in his face. Unless the Aperture facilities extended underground for miles, there was no way for this tiny shed in the middle of nowhere to be what he was looking for.

 

The day’s walk had tired him out, though, and the field’s lack of wildlife gave him a sense of safety. He thought he might head back to the last town he had visited once he got his energy back; at least there was someone there who signed as well as he could…

 

_BAM_

He was thrown forward with a great force and his face hit the dirt in front of him. He scrambled around to find his glasses when he heard a robotic voice and felt a vice like hand grabbing his leg.

 

“Thank you for assuming the party escort position!”


	2. Chapter 2

If anything, Gordon Freeman was a fighter, and he instinctively tried kicking the hand off him while his hands frantically searched for the glasses he needed to see. The grip refused to release him, and whatever had him ordered in a far too cheerful voice, “You’ll be late to the party if you keep this up!”

 

Needless to say, he didn’t want anything to do with any parties coming from a robot that lived in a shack in the middle of nowhere, so he continued to kick until his other leg was grabbed as well. He finally closed a hand around his glasses and shoved them on his face in time to get a glance over his shoulder at what the hell had grabbed him.

 

It was a strange whitish robot with a pink optic and two arms. He wasn’t sure what to make of it, but when he felt it start dragging him back towards the shed, he started struggling harder and reached for the handgun he normally kept on his hip. Before he could grab it, the voice said, “Guns will be confiscated for your safety.”

 

Not caring for that, Gordon tried to twist his upper body around so he could get a proper shot. Instantly, something shocked him. Hard. He couldn’t hold onto the gun anymore, and it dropped out of his hand as his HEV suit reported, “Warning! Electrical damage detected!” The part of him that was still present cursed at the realization that his suit had long gone without any sort of charge thanks to not needing it for every waking moment.

 

He couldn’t fight the robot anymore as it dragged him into the shed, and as soon as the extremely heavy door slammed, he could hear the hiss of gas spraying. He tried to make himself move to fight it, but his limbs refused to obey any commands from his brain. The HEV suit was saying something. Probably related to whatever gas it was, but he found he couldn’t focus on it. His body slumped onto the floor unconscious, and he didn’t see the strange robot call up an elevator.

 

* * *

 

 

The test subject pickings had been slim for the last month. Even though she had the humans Orange and Blue had found in storage, GLaDOS liked supplementing her test results with data from humans freshly picked from the surface. Those humans had the added benefit of not having a fifty percent chance of being brain dead, and they had the motivation to survive the tests. It helped keep the results from skewing too far towards the “Didn’t even start before expiring” end of the spectrum.

 

There hadn’t been any humans to come through the exit the mute lunatic had used, but that didn’t stop GLaDOS from having the Party Escort Robot explore the fields every so often. There were explicit instructions that if the mute lunatic was seen, she was to be ignored. Even if she had been one of the best test subjects, she was too much trouble to contain or kill, and GLaDOS didn’t want to deal with her again. Not unless something drastically changed.

 

It was a pleasant surprise then, when the pink eyed robot came back with a human from that area. She waited for the elevator to open to check the cameras. The fact that this human was wearing an HEV suit sans helmet and appeared to possess a Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator intrigued her. The scientists of Aperture had studied them, and there were panels for charging the suits that they had kept around in the labs. The Manipulator wasn’t deemed necessary since the Portal device could carry the same amount of weight, and after multiple… incidents, the fact that the Manipulator could also throw things was also deemed unnecessary for testing purposes.

 

A thought occurred to her, and she started running the calculations she still had on Manipulators and HEV suits. The one this strange human was wearing looked more advanced than the ones Aperture had possessed, and she might need to run a few tests to account for that, but it should be able to handle hostile environments at least on par with the old ones.

 

Before she could get too far ahead of herself, though, she needed to see just what kind of human she was dealing with. If need be, she could kill him and hold onto the items until she found a more suitable human, but it would be so much simpler if she didn’t have to train a dull-witted human.

 

_“Bring your find to the central chamber.”_

Of course, the robot didn’t have any reason to disobey, so they adjusted their course towards Her chamber. It didn’t know why she would be so interested in this subject, but since she didn’t punctuate her order with insults or sarcasm, she was possibly pleased, or at least didn’t hate the offering.

 

They found the lift that would go straight to GLaDOS’s chamber, and it wasn’t long before they were standing before the veritable goddess of Aperture Laboratories. The human was dumped on the ground like a bag of potatoes, and upon seeing how much heat he was packing, GLaDOS nearly told the Party Escort Robot to drag him through an Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grill. She changed her mind when she noticed the rocket launcher. As much as she would like none of these weapons to be in her facility, she didn’t want to risk an unneeded explosion.

 

_“Remove everything except the Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator and Hazardous Environment Suit before he wakes up.”_

The robot was quick to search the unconscious man over for all the weapons he had stored on him. The crowbar and basic handgun had been left topside, but he somehow had more weapons than most militia on his person.

 

Once the weapons were thrown to the floor, GLaDOS moved the panels and let the weapons drop into the abyss of the facility. Even if they went off, they wouldn’t cause any lasting damage before being corroded by the toxic waste at the bottom.

 

With that taken care of, her yellow optic narrowed at the robot that still stood in her presence. _“Go finish your job.”_ The snappy command made the robot all but jump to attention and flee out of the closest exit, and she refocused her attention on the human that dirtied her pristine chamber. Deciding she wanted him to wake up _now_ rather than wait for it to happen naturally, she pumped in the adrenaline vapor.

 

* * *

 

 

Gordon felt like he did when he crashed after a two-day caffeine binge in college, and his groggy brain took a few minutes to remember what happened when he had passed out. The hard floor instead of dirt was the first sign that something major was up, and when he could finally open his eyes, the pristine whites, blacks, and greys startled him all the way to waking world. He shot up and frantically tried to find a weapon as he looked around the strange room. He stopped dead when he saw the massive machine hanging from the ceiling. That looked like it was looking at him.

 

He had seen a lot of strange things when it came to the Combine, but nothing like this strange bit of machinery. There weren’t any guns mounted on it, so that eased a little of his worries. However, he couldn’t find _any_ of the weapons he had brought with him except for the gravity gun, and the memory of how he had probably ended up here kept him on edge. It also didn’t help that the aesthetic of this place borderline reminded him of Combine technology. Even though they had finally been kicked out a generation ago, that was only when looking at it from the perspective of the world. From his own, it had only been a year, maybe more or maybe less.

  
The machine immediately started to speak with a smooth feminine voice without waiting for any of his input, and he couldn’t help but stare at this marvel of technology. _“Hello and, again, welcome to the Aperture Science computer-aided enrichment center. We hope that the journey to the facility was pleasant.”_

He would have rolled his eyes at the statement, but the name of the facility caught his attention, and it showed on his curious face. He wasn’t sure if the machine took that as a cue to continue, or if it was running on a script that would eventually end. _“It has been a while since we have had a visitor.”_ The longer he stared at it-her, the more he noticed little… Quirks. The faceplate and optic moved ever so slightly, and even though she was mostly repeating a speech, something about her felt about as alive or even more so than the combine organic/machine hybrids. Slowly, he got to his feet and hefted the gravity gun up; even if it wasn’t his top choice in this situation, he could make it work.

 

There was a pause as she appeared to wait for him to speak, and he blanked. He refused to drop the gravity gun, and without his hands, he didn’t have an easy way to communicate. He shrugged a little to hopefully indicate that he was listening, but he wasn’t sure if she would properly recognize the action. AIs could get stuck on tiny details like that…

 

_“… You don’t speak either, do you?”_ Sometimes he had issues reading _human_ faces but reading a robot’s face was even harder. However, even he caught the slight change from impassive drone to something with a little more bite. With something akin to a _sigh,_ the robot stared at him harder, and he could have sworn she was looking at him with a narrowed eye. _“I will take your continued silence as a yes. No matter, even the mute are good at science.”_

He had to wonder what she meant by “either,” but there wasn’t an easy way to ask any sort of questions in his situation. He gave a half shrug and an apologetic look, but the look he was getting didn’t change. _“Your Hazardous Environment Suit looks… well used. In order to continue, it needs to be charged and tested to ensure it still works.”_

Gordon frowned and narrowed his own eyes before shuffling the gravity gun to rest on his hip and freeing one hand. Putting his fingers near his forehead and drawing his hand away into a “y” shape, he asked the robot a simple question. “Why?”

 

He waited to see if she answered, and it took a few seconds before she finally said, _“If you don’t have any questions, please proceed to the lift so that I can take you to the nearest charger.”_ His shoulders sagged, and while part of him wanted to tell her what he really thought, he also knew she wouldn’t understand him. There was also a part of him that was insanely curious about this place; he had heard bits and pieces about Aperture Science and had even put in an application at some point between his graduation and getting accepted at Black Mesa.

 

If he was also honest with himself, it wasn’t like he had anything better to do.

 

So he followed the AI’s order to the strange looking elevator to see just where he was going to end up next.

 

* * *

 

 

If she had hands, she would have buried her face in them. This was _another_ mute human and given her track record with that subset of humans, she wasn’t entirely eager to start with another one. However, she needed him for the next part of her plans, and as long as he was compliant, she wouldn’t worry about it. Thankfully, he looked far too interested in the facility and her to be freaked out over being brought in, and while _that_ was a curious reaction, she also didn’t plan on digging. She had understood his simple question, but she decided that it would be better if he thought she couldn’t understand his moving hands. It was better for people to assume she was dumber than she actually was, and if he proved to be a problem, she needed to keep her surprises up her metaphorical sleeve.

 

For now, though, there were tests to do.


	3. Chapter 3

The elevator wasn’t particularly noteworthy, Gordon decided, but that was only in comparison to everything he could see glimpses of through the clear doors. It was moving too quickly for his eyes to focus on anything for long, and the elevator shaft only had occasional openings, but that was enough to whet his curiosity even more. After nearly a year of wandering the still rebuilding world, it was amazing to see this level of technology, and the scientist in him was fascinated. Thanks to the chaos on the Borealis, he hadn’t had time to appreciate the technology on board, and now that he was in the labs, a small part of him regretted that.

 

When the elevator finally slowed and stopped, the robot’s voice clearly rang out over an intercom system. _“In order to ensure correct results and safety, we must first run you through the basics of how tests at Aperture Science work. It will be different, but far superior to training you may have received from a Black Mesa employee.”_  
  


The comment earned an eye roll from Gordon. He had heard that Aperture constantly fought with Black Mesa over grant money, so it shouldn’t have surprised him that some of the scientists would be bitter over that. He still found it funny that they would presume that the people who _made_ the HEV suits wouldn’t know how to train people to use it.

 

The voice continued after a pause. _“Please proceed out of the chamberlock and move forward. There will be a charger for your suit in the next room.”_

Deciding he didn’t want to hear her cycle through several scripts until he moved, he followed the instructions. He nearly tripped over his feet when he saw the words “Animal King” out of the corner of his eye on the screens that made up the walls of the chamberlock. He did a double take, but by the time he was focused on the screen again, it had switched scenes. Now it was talking about safety procedures in case of a fire.

 

Maybe there was something else in that sleeping gas.

 

Shaking it off, he hurried through the door before the robot’s next script kicked in. The room he entered was extremely bland with only pure white panels covering the majority of the wall and floor. The only thing that really stuck out was an old, orange faceplate that he was intimately familiar with. He heard the voice kick in, but he ignored her as he gently pulled the plug out. It had been a while since he had used one of the old chargers, but he had done this enough that muscle memory guided him through plugging it in.

 

Almost instantly, a voice he recognized started to speak. Even though the suit didn’t have a proper AI, it was still almost like hearing the voice of a friend he hadn’t seen in a while. Having heard the opening spiel multiple times, he tuned out that voice as he tried to make sure he didn’t miss out on anything important that the Aperture robot might be saying.

 

_“Good job. When you have fully charged the Hazardous Environment suit, please proceed to the next chamberlock.”_

As he waited for the charging to finish, he looked around at the rest of the room, and he noticed that the door he had come through had closed and another one had opened. He noted the stick figure icon nearby, likely indicating that it was an exit door. When he looked _through_ the door, though, he noticed a shimmery effect. He pulled off his glasses and futilely rubbed the glass before putting them back on. The strange watery… wall, for lack of a better word, was still there.

 

_How did they get a Combine forcefield down here?_ That was the closest thing he could compare it to, but he couldn’t see _how_ they would have managed that. _Or_ _did they make this on their own?_

 

The other question was how was he supposed to leave if the forcefield was blocking the exit.

 

He stared at it until the HEV suit cheerfully informed him that he was at 100% charge, and he stopped looking long enough to disconnect from the charger. He was a little surprised that it was able to take him from no power to full, but he wasn’t going to complain.

 

Once he had disconnected, the voice started speaking again. _“Note the incandescent particle field across the exit. This Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grill will vaporize any unauthorized equipment that passes through it. Do not worry, your Hazardous Environment Suit and Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator count as authorized equipment."_

At least that answered his question of how he could leave. He still approached it cautiously and carefully stuck his hand through it. The glove stayed on his hand with no smoking or vaporizing, so he cautiously followed and pushed the rest of himself through. He thought he heard a faint hum as he passed through the grill, but thankfully, it let him pass without issue.

 

This chamberlock was the same as the last, and there was an already waiting elevator. Eyeing the screens as he passed them by, he walked to the open doors and steadied himself as the elevator took him upwards to the next chamber.

 

* * *

 

 

The mute man was extremely compliant, GLaDOS noted. He may have spent more time just staring at the machinery and the test components than actually completing the simple objectives, but since he never threatened to break them, she only occasionally nudged him to keep moving.

 

The numbers would have made her consider that maybe he wasn’t the most mentally astute subject, but, in some ways, she recognized the awe in which he regarded the test chambers. The purpose of these chambers was to familiarize him with the buttons and cubes that could appear in the Aperture Science Hazardous Environment Suit Hazard Course. In other words, these were such simple tests that if her guess was right, then he found them easy, and his mind was focused on other things.

 

Even though she claimed to be better than this, a part of her itched to put him in a proper test to see his true potential. Maybe she could add an extra testing element to the training course? Nothing fatal, of course, since he seemed to be an obedient little human and finding and training another would be a hassle, but it had been far too long since she had a competent human test subject.

 

The longer she thought on that, and the more time he spent simply examining the chambers, the more appealing the idea seemed. He was currently enthralled with the orange and blue portal panels, and if something that mundane was distracting him, then the boring and repetitious hazard course would not entice him to finish in a reasonable time.

 

… Given that he was still messing around with the portals built into the walls, she had plenty of time to figure out how to alter the base course without defeating the original purpose.

 

* * *

 

 

Gordon felt more alive now than he had in months. He hadn’t had the time during the war to analyze and appreciate the modern technology he had seen, and this was almost on par with the Combine’s tech.  
  
What really took the cake and fascinated him above all else were the blue and orange portals. Black Mesa hadn’t figured out how to skip going to Xen when they made their portal entrances and exits originally, and then with the border world discovery, they didn’t _want_ to stop going there. He had been massively impressed when Dr. Kleiner told him that they had finally figured out teleportation that simply took one from one place to another. Even if there had been issues. But this was still something else entirely. He could actually see through the portals, and it didn’t affect his momentum when he walked or ran through them.

 

_“Please note that you are still being timed for these tests, even if they are the tutorial rooms.”_

The robotic voice interrupted his train of thought, and when he half twisted around, he tripped over his feet and landed through the orange glowing portal. It was a little disorienting to see his legs on the far side of the room when he could just look through the portal and still see them there. However, he did note that his momentum had been preserved. Unfortunately. The HEV suit made him land like a sack of potatoes, and it took him a moment to get up.

 

He figured the words were just part of the robot’s script to get him to move, but the bored tone in which the words had been said caught his attention. It was the second time it felt like there had been… more to the script.

 

  
For now, he shoved the thought to the side as he dropped this room’s heavy cube on an unmissable red button. The exit door opened, and he hurried through it to the next elevator.

 

_“Now the Aperture Science Hazard Course will be slightly altered from a course hosted elsewhere, but it will still contain the same elements. Be aware that the next rooms will be more advanced than the ones you just experienced.”_

He had already done the Black Mesa course, how much more difficult could Aperture Science’s be?


	4. Chapter 4

_Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer._

 

The next room was _nothing_ like what he expected. When the voice had mentioned that the course was going to be different, he didn’t expect it to be _this_ different.

 

The original hazard course he had gone through was mostly an over glorified obstacle course that made sure people could actually move in the armored hazmat suit and that it reacted to “threats” appropriately. The first room was literally meant to see if one could jump in the HEV suit.

 

_This_ looked like an actual challenge.

 

Slowly walking forward, he carefully observed the room. As if waiting for him, the voice kicked in to say, _“The Aperture Science Hazard Course was condensed in size to test multiple elements at once instead of the tedium of multiple rooms. Rest assured that this course will still qualify as the needed training to properly utilize a Hazardous Environment Suit.”_

 

He heard the hiss of the door behind him as it shut, so the only way to go was forward.

 

Since one of the heavy cubes had been dropped nearby, he went ahead and grabbed it with the gravity gun. Even though he couldn’t see it yet, he knew there was going to be a button at some point that he’d need to drop it on.

 

Unfortunately, he couldn’t see the button yet, so he couldn’t just blast it in the general direction he needed it to go, so he was stuck actually using the gravity gun to haul it around.

 

He really hoped he wouldn’t need to crawl like this.

 

* * *

 

 

She could see the figurative gears in the man’s head turning as he walked into the chamber. The wonder wasn’t completely gone, yet, but he was finally acting like a proper test subject.

 

At least what _she_ considered a proper test subject.

 

It was nice, for once, for the subject to do what they were told without arguing or crying or trying to murder her.

  
Even though the only one to attempt and succeed at that last endeavor had also been the _best_ test subject.

 

She didn’t doubt that this one would eventually tire of the tasks and want to escape, but she already planned on fixing that problem when the time came.

 

It didn’t take him long to finish the obstacle course, which proved he was at least physically capable of walking around. Frankly, this part was fairly obvious, but she had procedures to follow, and it sated her testing urge.

 

It was the second part where he might start showing his colors. Not everyone would be willing to fall far enough to ensure they got hurt or walk past hot steam.

 

“ _Now the next part is meant to cover the ways the Hazardous Environment Suit is meant to protect you and alert you to injury. The Enrichment Center values safety, but prolonged exposure to the testing elements ahead may cause side effects up to and including death.”_

 

* * *

 

 

Gordon was in the chamberlock and about to enter the elevator when the robot announced that last fun bit of information. He threw his head back and sighed with exaggeration. He wasn’t around anyone else to appreciate the performance, but it still gave him some catharsis.

 

So far, the facility hadn’t been _dangerous_ in the parts he had seen, and even if the course here had been… creative, it hadn’t been vastly different in terms of survivability. He had no reason to doubt that the next part would be similar.

 

However, he also knew that Black Mesa’s course was barely straddling the line of being safe, and he wasn’t sure how it would be handled elsewhere.

 

The elevator nor the next chamberlock offered no sign of what was to come.

 

Taking a moment to stretch, he could feel his body complaining about that awful army crawl he had to do in order to hold the gravity gun, which held the cube, and crawl at the same time. So much for hoping for comfort. Hopefully the next part wouldn’t make him wish that the HEV suit hadn’t run out of morphine forever ago.

  
The room he walked into was as minimalist as ever; there was a clear panel attached to a mechanism that would move it forward, and it was suspended over a deep indention that looked like it should have something in it.

 

He thought he heard a portal panel activate, and when he turned to look around, he could see a blue one open nearby. The sight of the clear panel from a lower perspective made him think it was probably meant to be a way to get back up if he fell off the mobile platform.

 

_Well that’s promising._

 

He didn’t know what this thing would have that would knock him off the platform, but for the moment, he just hoped that maybe it was just an anti-frustration feature if he somehow tripped.

 

Once he stood on the clear panel, it started moving, and the robotic voice began to speak again. _“This part simply requires you to stand on the panel and the rooms ahead will deal with each dangerous variable the suit is designed to handle. As long as you stay on, you will be safe. If you don’t, please quickly run back to the first room where a convenient portal has been set up to start over.”_

 

_Even better._

 

He heavily considered just sitting down for this if he had to ride this thing until the end, but the fact that she specifically talked about standing before now made him wonder if this was calibrated to work at a certain height. For now, he decided not to risk it.

 

The first room he was taken through started uncomfortably warm. It took him a minute to notice the literal flames across the floor among various mechanical parts that were obviously thrown away, but the flames didn’t seem to affect them much. Not even a blackening of the bleach white surfaces.

 

He could feel the panel dip closer to the flames, and his skin felt like it was about to burn off. Sweat poured down his face in reaction to the extreme heat. It didn’t take long for the HEV suit to all but scream, _“Warning: Extreme heat damage detected,”_ and the only thing keeping him from jumping off was the knowledge that it would only get hotter if he did.

 

The panel then angled a little upwards, and while it took him out of the danger zone of the heat, it was still way too hot for comfort. Mentally, he was urging the panel to go faster, but he paused when he thought he heard _snarling_. He glanced around, but the flames and the fact that he was constantly moving made it hard to focus on anything in particular. He thought he saw things twitching in a pile, but the panel was already entering the next hallway, and he didn’t want to get surprised by whatever else would be thrown at him.

 

The next room simply tested whether the Geiger counter still worked, and he didn’t even need to get close for that infernal ticking to start. It was a small mercy that this was a very small room, which didn’t require him to listen to it for long. Probably because the researchers who used to observe these didn’t feel like listening to it either.

   
In the hallway to the next room, he really started to wonder when his priorities got this messed up.

 

The facility refused to let him have his introspective moment, because then he was informed: _“This room contains a minute trace of neurotoxin; the suit has been supplied with a cure for it, so don’t be alarmed.”_

 

_When the hell did she do that? I haven’t taken this thing off at all? I don’t think I did, did I?_

 

All while this was going on in his head, the panel carried him to and through a door that immediately shut behind him. The room was completely innocuous, and the only thing that made it clear the robot hadn’t been screwing with him was the HEV suit. It very quickly gave a biohazard warning followed up with a sharp pain he could feel in his arm. That must have been the cure she had been talking about. He hoped anyway.

 

The next door didn’t open until he was nearly slammed into it, but the panel moved forward with the complete confidence that it would open on time. Or that was the nice way he would put it.

 

The next few rooms were in a similar vein as the last three in terms of how simple they were and how little input he had to give for things. By the time the panel stopped moving, he didn’t expect it and nearly faceplanted for the third time that day.

 

Once his feet were finally steady about being on stable ground again, he finally got to look at the new room he was in. There was nothing in it. Except for the fact that he was kinda high up, and the door was at the bottom.

 

“ _We have to test the Hazardous Environment Suit’s ability to notice and fix actual damage done to your body, so a jump from a minimally dangerous height was deemed the best way to test this without risk of killing you. It won’t hurt for long.”_

 

_Of course they didn’t alter **this** part._

 

There weren’t even any cardboard boxes or wooden crates that could cushion this fall. Though he had a feeling that even if there were, he would just get told to get back up and jump again.

 

He didn’t see much point in fighting this. This was basically the same thing as before.

 

It didn’t mean he had to like it.

 

He jumped down, and his legs and knees protested, causing a collapse. He could hear the HEV suit talk about the injury, but it was difficult to focus on the exact words.

 

There was a pain in his other arm, and the sharp pains in his legs started getting muddy. Along with his thoughts.

 

_This can’t go well._

  
It had been a long time since his body had had to deal with morphine, and it seemed like his built up resistance had worn off.

 

_I thought that completely run out months ago._

  

He didn’t think the suit manufactured its own medical supplies, but this was the second time in a day it had something he thought he had run out of. Maybe there was something about the chargers here that messed with that feature.

 

Regardless, it was really hard to focus on things right now, and he stumbled a little when he stood back up. Once he was through the door, he noticed that there was a familiar wall medkit next to a charger on the wall in the hallway to the chamberlock.

 

Recharging the suit was a great idea, since it was already complaining about low charges thanks to protecting him from the previous hazards one after another. The medicine in the kit could be applied through a port in the suit, so he plugged that in as soon as the charger finished.

 

Whatever happened next, he didn’t want to deal with a potentially injured leg.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Okay so here's where I start showing just how self indulgent this is going to be.

Her new test subject had been standing for a minute before he leaned against the wall near the stations and slid down it into a crumbled sitting position. Then he did something she hadn’t expected.

 

He fell asleep.

 

Maybe she shouldn’t have tweaked the Hazardous Environment suit’s medical care when he first connected it to the charger and gave her access to the thing.

 

She heavily considered pumping in more adrenaline vapor so that he could at least get into the elevator and do the last test she needed, but she didn’t want to cause his heart to literally explode. At least not yet, anyway. Not while he was in between testing chambers.

 

Since the suit was still connected to the medical station, she could keep tabs on his heart rate, and since he didn’t appear to be dying, she decided to focus on some other matters while she waited for him to wake up naturally.

 

The first thing that needed to be handled was that this upgraded suit did not appear to have a matching helmet, and she needed him to go somewhere that definitely needed it. Sure, she could have sent a robot to handle that part of the plan, but the entire point of this charade was so that she could collect the pieces of Aperture that had escaped her grasp without losing _more_ of it.

 

She had bigger fish to fry, though, than to waste her precious time on something so menial, so she looked through the logs to find a functional AI that could take care of it efficiently.

 

Oh, _this_ one would do nicely.

 

“ _Maintenance core, I have a task for you.”_

 

* * *

 

To say Virgil didn’t expect to be specifically called by Her would be a vast understatement. He had been absentmindedly tweaking some shoddy panels that weren’t obeying the orders from Her to rearrange as she wanted, but the sudden command caused him to enter a wrong code and made one of the panels start banging against the far wall with much unneeded force.

 

“Oh, come on! I did _not_ activate the Aperture Science Crusher protocols, calm down,” He chided the panel as he entered the Stop command. He sighed as the loud clangs stalled, and the panel hung crookedly off of the metal bars holding it up like a dejected toddler. He would deal with that later.

 

GLaDOS hadn’t waited until he could actually hear what she was saying, but thankfully, she also sent the request in text form. _“_ _Find a Hazardous Environment suit’s helmet and upgrade it_ _to work with an upgraded suit_ _.”_ Along with the order, She had sent schematics of a vastly improved HEV suit that he couldn’t help but admire a little. It clearly wasn’t of Aperture Science design; it was far too clunky and square, and he wondered how She had gotten Her metaphorical hands on it.

 

He knew better than to ask

 

The better question was “How was he supposed to find a helmet to work with it.” When humans had been deemed mostly unnecessary, the suits and therefore the helmets had also been deemed useless. As the facility became more and more automated, there wasn’t a need to give humans the ability to protect themselves from dangerous situations.

 

He would have tried to get one for Mel if just finding one was easy.

 

… Wait.

 

What was She doing putting one of her test subjects into an HEV suit?

 

She wasn’t the kind of robot who would just give something that valuable without some kind of motive. The ability to stay alive in hostile environments would be a hindrance to Her definition of science.

 

Unfortunately, there wasn’t an easy answer to any of his questions, and he needed results for Her task more than he needed to figure the situation out.

 

Now that the facility was mostly back in working order, he did have a few ideas as to where he could start looking for the suit helmets, and as he zipped along his management rail to the closest location, he connected to a security network to see if he could get video footage of the last few hours.

 

A voice made him twitch and halt on the rail. “Why are you connecting to a security network?” The voice, while not the same deep, reverberating voice of AEGIS, was very similar to the now sleeping guardian AI. He wasn’t sure if that had been intended, similar designs for efficiency and all that, or if he was imagining it.

 

“Oh uh, it’s fine! I just need to see what uh, She, brought into the facility. She wants me to find something for a test, and I needed to know how big the subject was.” He figured invoking Her name would get the quickest results with even the most stubborn Aperture AI.

 

The other AI was quiet for a moment before saying, “Reason acceptable. Don’t dig any deeper than that, or I will invoke a block on your Wi-Fi capabilities.”

 

“Understood! I promise!” Thankfully, he wasn’t entirely lying, so it was easy to simply omit the fact that he was curious. And worried. Every time he was alerted to a human getting dragged down to the abyssal hell that was Aperture Science, he was terrified that he would see a redheaded woman with a familiar face.

 

That wasn’t to say he didn’t feel for the humans when they weren’t her, but… he had to keep his distance or else face the consequences.

 

He downloaded the footage he needed before he continued on his way down the rail. Since it was going to take a few more minutes to get there, he started the video from the beginning.

 

Virgil had another moment of sheer panic when he saw the newcomer’s hair color. The fact that the hair was longer and that it took a few minutes before he could even see the human’s face gave him a feeling of immense dread. A rather useful survival tactic, but not a fun thing to experience.

 

At some point, the human was rolled over, and the human’s face was thankfully not Mel’s. Once he could stop focusing on the human’s head, he could better appreciate the upgraded HEV suit on an actual human. The schematics had been nice, and would help with the needed upgrades for a helmet, but it really helped to see the thing actually on someone.

 

What he hadn’t expected was that he also had footage of the human “testing.” He could see the human as he quietly studied the chambers, and it struck a chord in Virgil. He had seen that same determined look in Mel’s eyes. He immediately closed the file. He knew what he needed. He couldn’t let himself project onto the newcomer who was firmly in GLaDOS’s clutches.

 

* * *

 

With that matter taken care of, GLaDOS was ready to-

 

[ALERT: BLACK MESA EMPLOYEE SIGHTED ON APERTURE PROPERTY]

 

Rolling her optic in a way that would remind one of a human rolling their eyes, GLaDOS, closed the alert for the 10th time that day. The new human’s generic appearance plus the suit were triggering the Black Mesa alarm that she wished she could finally disable. After all this time, it was highly unlikely any of Aperture’s former rivals were still alive.

 

This wasn’t the only time the alarm had gone off, either, and it seemed like every other human that was grabbed from the topside would trigger it. She later found out it was because that even if the humans of Black Mesa were no longer alive, apparently their junk had been turned into a fashion statement.

 

She wasn’t interested in talking to the humans to find out more, and their usefulness only lasted a few short hours, anyway.

 

With the alarm gone and no longer distracting her, she went over her list of what needed to be done next. The next room for the normal training course simply involved using the long jump module, which she just re-enabled, and if the Maintenance core couldn’t find a helmet in a few hours, she was going to direct the human to a Short-Term Relaxation vault.

 

Given that the core she had contacted had a good record of completing tasks, it was unlikely that they would need anything more than that.

 

Next on the list was checking in on the special room that she was making specifically to test low or no oxygen environments in. With a helmet, the Hazardous Environment suit’s ability to maintain needed blood oxygen levels would be vastly improved, and if needed, there was a port that could hold an oxygen tank. The suit itself also doubled as a way to maintain needed pressure. As to why it came with _that_ functionality, she wasn’t entirely certain, but the thought that they might have partnered with NASA for it definitely came to mind.

 

The room wasn’t entirely ready, since she needed a way to emulate low gravity, and this involved adjusting the Excursion Funnels. She had thrown Orange and Blue in there to ensure that it was survivable as she changed the numbers around. So far they had both died ten times due to malfunctioning Funnels, but she was at least closer to getting a low gravity room.

 

If anything, it added an interesting element to the usual tedium of testing with the young robots.

 

She checked back in with the sleeping subject, and he was still out like a light. Maybe she could-

 

[Borealis Update!]

 

 _Oh that should be interesting._ Even though the files were constantly scattered and received in the wrong order, every piece of the puzzle provided some fascinating data.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, sorry, I couldn't find a way to squeeze in Gordon in this chapter without breaking the flow. And yeah, I'm including Portal Stories: Mel as part of the canon of this au. Virgil isn't going to be a main player, but the fact that he and Mel exist kinda help move some of my other ideas along. I hope you enjoy!


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